[199] (a) W. T. Arnold, Keats, Poetical Works, p. 128. (b) J. Hoops, Keats’s Jungend und Jugendgedichte, Englische Studien, XXI, 239. (c) W. A. Read, Keats and Spenser.
[200] Works, V, p. 121.
[201] This same expression occurs in Hero and Leander, 1819, in the phrase, “Half set in trees and leafy luxury.” Keats’s dedication sonnet in which it occurs was written in 1817. Therefore Mr. W. T. Arnold makes a mistake when he says (in his edition of Keats, p. 129) it was taken direct from Hunt’s poem, although the two separate words are among his favorites and Keats probably took them from him and combined them.
[202] Mr. Arnold says “delicious” is used sixteen times by Keats. (Keats, Poetical Works, p. 129). He quotes a passage from one of Hunt’s prefaces in which the latter comments on Chaucer’s use of the word: “The word deliciously is a venture of animal spirits which in a modern writer some critics would pronounce to be too affected or too familiar; but the enjoyment, and even incidental appropriateness and relish of it, will be obvious to finer senses.” In Rimini this line occurs: “Distils the next note more deliciously.”
[203] Palgrave, Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 261, notices Leigh Hunt’s misuse of this word in his review of I stood tiptoe, quoted on p. 107. See his use of the same on p. 76. In Bacchus and Ariadne it occurs in this passage “all luxuries that come from odorous gardens.”
[204] This is used in Hyperion, II, l. 45. The expression “plashy pools” occurs in the Story of Rimini.
[205] November 11, 1820.
[206] Life of Percy Bysshe Shelly, II, p. 36.
[207] Imagination and Fancy, p. 231.
[208] Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, pp. 252-3.